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David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face

• swombat 13y ago
  Jaw: on floor. The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."
  • breckinloggins 13y ago
    "You've had your fun. [...]" That line is particularly infuriating.
    • VladRussian2 13y ago
      in some way it is the key to understanding the situation - the government people live in another world, and things look differently from their perspective. Like it is not a useful reporting and public debate about government's abuse of power, it is a fun some pests have at the government expense. It is a reality distortion field of Power.
      • CmdrKrool 13y ago
        Mmm. Or rather, it's all fun to them being as they make the rules and can never ultimately lose the game. They seem to forget that for the rest of us it's not quite so discretionary.
      • joe_the_user 13y ago
        It will indeed, sadly turn out to be the truth unless the reporting on Snowden's material turns to change current policy - something that is not at all certain.
      • moocowduckquack 13y ago
        Is the golden wall.[1] It isn't power, it is the illusion of power and the attempt to keep it up that corrupts. Is all the lies you have to tell people about the things you claim to control and all the fakes you have to pull all the fucking time, just to make people think that you genuinely have some clue about what is going on so that you can retain authority. But you never do. No one can. For all the technology in the world, nobody can do more than the amount of time they have and their ability to comprehend, and after a while the amount of information becomes a hindrance and you wish you could plug the flow, and you would in a moment, apart from the fact that if people thought you were not watching it for even a second, forever trapped in watching it with far too much to understand, that you wouldn't know what was going on and you can never let that happen. [1] I nicked this phrase from Harry Mulisch, from his book "The Discovery of Heaven". Is a good book.
      • stevenbedrick 13y ago
        Thank you. This is an important point, and one that I haven't seen nearly enough of on HN lately. It is very difficult to overstate the extent to which "government people" live in a bubble. In many ways, they are working from an entirely different set of first principles than those used by most of the HN-reading world. As such, it is difficult for "us" to understand why "they" do what they do, and very easy for us to come up with our own (usually incorrect, or at the very least, incomplete) explanations for their behavior. Of course, the converse is generally true: the laughably incorrect explanations that "government people" always seem to come up with for "our" behavior often are the result of them interpreting events, statements, etc. through their lens- a lens informed by a completely different set of optical principles than the ones that we are used to using (to abuse the figure of speech a little bit). In other words, when you read or hear about a "government person" doing or saying something head-deskingly stupid, the odds are very good that the statement or action made perfect sense in the context of that government person's world. It's not that they're (necessarily) stupid, or even ignorant- just that they're not living in our world, and so have dramatically different motivations, constraints, first principles, etc. etc. Their actions may be perfectly follow an internal logic- but it's not our logic, and so we have a hard time making sense of it. And all of this goes double or triple when we're talking about military or IC people. The classified nature of their work, with its attendant organizational, cultural, technical, political, and psychological distortions, makes their "bubble" look more like a bathysphere.
        • spin 13y ago
          This is useful for trying to understand other people. You should always try to figure out how/why a person came to their particular worldview. But in a government "of the people, by the people, for the people", it is The People who have final say. (edit: yes, I am aware that this particular incident happened in England, not the U.S....)
        • w_t_payne 13y ago
          I remember having a conversation in a pub with a junior Whitehall civil servant a number of years ago. Only half jokingly, he quipped that "of course the civil service runs the country", noting the relative powerlessness of parliament. Interestingly enough, the more senior (and experienced) civil servants that I have had the opportunity to talk to have been very careful to emphasise that the department answers to the minister. Of course, the relationship between the civil service, ministers and the media is an unnatural, strained and stressful one -- I do not envy any of these parties, although I think that the media has the most (effective) power out of these three, given the proportion of central government activity (60-70%?) that is driven by whatever happened to be in the headlines that week.
  • jmduke 13y ago
    Unless I'm misinterpreting this, those are paraphrases and not quotes. There's no feasible reason to believe a government official is overtly villainous or foolish enough to say something like "You've had your fun."
    • UVB-76 13y ago
      It does sound exactly like the type of goading comment a government official would make to a journalist off the record.
      • dylangs1030 13y ago
        All of this controversy aside, do you have any real reference point for what a conversation between a government official and a journalist sounds like, let alone a goading one at that?
        • bdamm 13y ago
          Yes; take what happens at the local politics level, and amplify it up several orders of magnitude.
    • dabeeeenster 13y ago
      I'm not quite sure the editor of one of the most important newspapers of record right now is into "paraphrasing"
      • jmduke 13y ago
        There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on. That is, by definition, paraphrasing the meeting. I'm not accusing Rusbridger of mischaracterizing the interaction, I'm clarifying that this is probably isn't a direct quote. Note that this is an op/ed.
        • trauco 13y ago
• prteja11 13y ago
  With the NSA debate, I keep wondering if there is something people in positions in the government and security agencies know that makes them keep doing what they're doing. I mean some of these people are really smart and understand how this spying can be abused. There must be something they know that makes them build or support these programs.
  • VladRussian2 13y ago
    >I mean some of these people are really smart and understand how this spying can be abused. There must be something they know that makes them build or support these programs. just look at the recent 100 years of human history - good and smart people can perpetrate awful things if they suitably organized and informed. "Just doing my job", "just carrying out the orders", etc... In 21st century in the world's most progressive country, government employees and contractors were torturing other people just because some government lawyer wrote a memo saying it is a good thing.
  • Zimahl 13y ago
    They build it because they can and they are told to. First, they are payed well to STFU, ethics vs. money. Second, if they do speak up they'll just be replaced. Third, if they are replaced, they are legally bound that they cannot speak about it. So why bother fighting against the current? Someone somewhere must've determined it's legal... right? Snowden is pretty chilling. Doing the right thing and bring up a major issue will cost you everything other than your life. I'd like to think I'd do the same but I just don't know.
    • DamnYuppie 13y ago
      That is why I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Snowden. He did something that was very difficult to do all the while KNOWING the consequences of it and far deeper and better then any of us do now.
  • aylons 13y ago
    They know the taste of power.
  • 13y ago
• monsterix 13y ago
  I think it's quite important to share the names of the men from Whitehall to the world. I mean we all know names of only the people defending public interest so far: aka Greenwald, Snowden, Miranda and a few others. We should be told about everyone from the other side too. Like we learned about Keith Alexander of NSA, you know. It is of utmost importance to make names of public servants well - truly public - because they're the ones using tax-payers money and should have been defending public interest instead.
  • rolux 13y ago
    Agree. But, FWIW, Alan Rusbridger, the author of the article, explains in the comments that in this case, this would not be legal, as the conversations he is quoting from took place after he had agreed to keep names off the record.
    • angersock 13y ago
      When the bastards make the rules at whim, there is nothing to be gained from playing by those same rules.
      • rolux 13y ago
        I'd guess that the gain for Mr. Rusbridger is that he retains his privilege to be able to quote from similarly absurd conversations with government officials in the future.
      • westicle 13y ago
        That rule is actually made by journalists, not governments.
        • deleted 13y ago
          [deleted]
      • jmduke 13y ago
        A journalist who violates conditions of 'off-the-record' is not going to be a journalist for much longer, because nobody will tell him anything. The 'bastards' who made the rules, in this case, are the journalists themselves.
• c16 13y ago
  What infuriates me is that not enough people care for them to demand change. It goes on the news one day then the next it's gone. Information-overload. That's their card and they'll keep playing it.
  • xradionut 13y ago
    The media has been "captured" with all the other "estates". Many people outside of the tech elite are aware of what's going on. What do you want the public to do? Protest? Riot? Revolt? Vote? Those aren't good choices considering what control the US and the UK government have over every aspect of life. The best thing to do right now is observe and remember. Don't let this depress you, worse things have and will happen in history.
    • ISL 13y ago
      Vote. In aggregate, it has infinite power over an incumbent politician's future office. It's hard to know what you're getting when you vote for someone new, but it's easy to vote for or against an incumbent based upon past performance.
      • vinceguidry 13y ago
        Voting will gain you nothing in the US, even if you manage to unseat an incumbent. The big companies running the country via lobbyists will just turn their huge pocketbooks towards the new guy, and the status quo will continue. Congressmen generally aren't even afraid of losing their jobs anymore. They'll just stick around in Washington and become conference speakers or lobbyists. There's a rule saying you can't lobby for two years after you lose your seat, but that doesn't stop them. To understand how politics works at the national level in this country, This Town is required reading. http://www.amazon.com/This-Town-Parties-Funeral-Plus-Americas/dp/0399161309 http://www.amazon.com/This-Town-Parties-Funeral-Plus-America...
        • ISL 13y ago
          This works only if the electorate allows their votes to be bought. We can vote for whomever we choose. The notion that a third party vote is 'wasted' is false. Even in a two-party system, it's an irrefutable signal to the dominant parties that available votes are being left on the table. There are lots of unpleasant realities about our present system, but that can't stop us from voting for the reality we'd like to see. If we do, it will happen. TL;DR : "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
• 616c 13y ago
  There is something truly entertaining about the insistence they smash the hard drives. The number of computer-illiterate C-level assholes I have met all insist on applying analog world logic to their digital decision making. When you try to properly correct them for wasting their time or embarrassing themselves to end up on sites like HN, they lose it. I find it funny how badly such people in positions of government corporate power need to prove to themselves they have any recourse in contexts or fields where they are too stupid to find a proper solution to their own dilemma.
  • MattyRad 13y ago
    On that note, I think the rise of Bitcoin will be particularly interesting (assuming it keeps rising). Already it has been introduced before Congress, as a money laundering mechanism, no less. With nothing to smash, I wonder how they might deal with such a technology.
    • philangist 13y ago
      The thing I like about bitcoin is that it's just the first of many. It's not perfect, but the fact that there's a decentralized cryptocurrency with major traction out there makes me giddy for what the future holds. We're living in a cyberpunk world.
    • SkyMarshal 13y ago
      Easy, they'll order people to smash the Google instead of just hard drives. Problem solved.
      • etherael 13y ago
        Dang and blast it, foiled again by these fiendishly clever government chaps! Oh well lads better just get back to the slave mill the jig is up.
    • handsomeransoms 13y ago
      You could smash the drives that store individual's private keys, but beyond that - that's one of the benefits of a truly decentralized system.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• revelation 13y ago
  There is a bizarre jump in this story. How did they go from phone calls and meetings to incinerating MacBooks? (Obviously, as a journalist, you need to start recording these conversations and publishing names. There can be no privacy for government employees.)
  • lostlogin 13y ago
    The modern equivalent of burning books?
    • james_madison 13y ago
      where they burn macbooks, they will ultimately burn people also
    • astrodust 13y ago
      Fahrenheit 4566: The temperature at which your MacBook Pro's aluminum casing boils.
• dtf 13y ago
  Rusbridger responding to an AMA question on reddit a week or two ago: "Various difficulties have been put in our way (sorry to be vague, but this is an ongoing story). We’re working round them. And, yes, more to come....." http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1jf6uc/i_am_alan_rusbridger_editor_in_chief_of_the/cbe31e7?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1jf6uc/i_am_alan_rusbr...
• leokun 13y ago
  Our governments have lost a great deal of good faith as a result of the manner in which they've handled this. They're applying tactics from the 1950's in the modern age, and it's just blowing up in their faces and they're not coming out looking so well. I just wish there was more introspection and less of whatever you want to call this madness.
• nilved 13y ago
  What's up with HN and these shitty titles lately? This says literally nothing. It isn't rhetorical or helpful at all. Tell me about the article.
  • seiji 13y ago
    The original title was: "You've had your debate. There's no need to write anymore." (theguardian.com) The new title is: David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face (theguardian.com) I prefer the first one.
    • ra 13y ago
      Once again the posters title was overruled despite the fact that it was on top of page 1, the posters title was a quote taken directly from the article, and the post was generating good discussion.
      • nilved 13y ago
        None of those things matter at all. The second title is objectively more descriptive and that's what titles should be.
        • seiji 13y ago
          Only truth. Only fact. No art. No feeling. Sad world.
          • nilved 13y ago
            Why are you coming to a news website for intentionally unhelpful "artistic" headlines? I think you might have made a wrong turn.
            • barrkel 13y ago
              Who put you in charge and gave you the idea that HN was a news website? The site is 99% opinion, 1% external links. It is in no way a news site, in the way that phrase is normally understood.
• mcphilip 13y ago
  Is it just me it does anyone else feel like this is one of the most important articles posted in... decades? The guardian is obviously put at grave risk for revealing that UK spooks have gone so far as to oversee destruction of inconvienient materials in the London office, threatening legal action if this material is not dropped. I applaud the guardian for their bravery and excellence in reporting.
  • thisrod 13y ago
    I grok a different subtext: It's a journalist's job to know where the skeletons are buried, and where the escorts keep their address books. Journalists also have ready access to dictionaries, with which to clarify the meanings of words. Such words include "mutually", "assured" and "destruction".
    • venomsnake 13y ago
      Sadly the way US and UK are mishandling the whole thing can lead to a lot stuff leaked that could possibly cause real harm.
• dnautics 13y ago
  I am not entirely certain about the history of how this happened, but in the US "the press" has taken on an unintended meaning - to refer to the fourth estate. So somehow we have created a privileged class of citizens who enjoy special constitutional protections. Originally, and rightfully, "the press" refers to the the machine used to print broadsheets (not the people who do the printing) - and so freedom of the press would probably be best interpreted as "freedom of anyone to use technology to disseminate information", which is one step beyond "freedom of speech".
  • redblacktree 13y ago
    That's an interesting view. Not to challenge you, but for my own edification, do you have sources for that?
    • reginaldo 13y ago
      Here are some references to get you started: http://www.volokh.com/2012/01/02/the-original-and-traditional-meaning-of-freedom-of-the-press/ http://www.volokh.com/2012/01/02/the-original-and-traditiona... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec... (Relevant part: The majority opinion viewed "freedom of the press" as an activity, applicable to all citizens or groups of citizens seeking to publish views). However, before you even delve into the references, note that the First Amendment reads: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. IMHO, the expression freedom of speech, or of the press conveys the idea of freedom of the spoken word and freedom of the written word. Of course, I am not a lawyer, not an american, and also not a native english speaker, so my impressions on language have to be taken with a grain of salt.
  • sbirchall 13y ago
    A worthwhile read on the British history of this subject is "Power without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain" My biggest take from this is that your notion that "freedom of anyone to use technology to disseminate information" as upheld by the printing establishment is significantly undermined by the business of printing itself - whereby the cost of disseminating information has increased consistently to make a truly "free" press completely prohibitive to the average person. The book goes into great detail about how this happened and the nature of how the internet effects this pattern. I would highly recommend this to anyone reading this thread.
• ecmendenhall 13y ago
  If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on an encrypted, backed-up, redundantly distributed hard drive — forever.
• mpyne 13y ago
  Wow, a Guardian article that had something positive to say about the U.S. My jaw has also hit the floor! FWIW, I also agree that shredding hard disks is far overstepping the bounds of what is proper.
• cmsmith 13y ago
  >That work is immensely complicated by the certainty that it would be highly unadvisable for Greenwald (or any other journalist) to regard any electronic means of communication as safe. Can anyone comment on how accurate that statement is? I would imagine that two people (Greenwald and Poitras) who frequently meet face-to-face could set up a secure way of transferring data.
  • hondje 13y ago
    I wouldn't trust anything that important across a wire, and neither should you.
  • fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    >I would imagine that two people (Greenwald and Poitras) who frequently meet face-to-face could set up a secure way of transferring data. Two people that the gov't didn't know it needed to care about might be able to accomplish that feat. But Greenwald and Poitras against determined governments with vast resources? Imagine the motivation among the NSA operations and cryptanalyst folks at this moment. This has got to be one of the most exciting times ever to be an NSA spook (assuming of course you agree with the mission, and don't care too much about people's rights). I think in the current environment even guys like Zimmerman and Applebaum might find it challenging to operate under Greenwald's and Poitras' conditions.
    • vidarh 13y ago
      The natural response in this case is to communicate anything that is ok to have intercepted directly. E.g.copies of the documents that come from the NSA. Article drafts that'll get published soon anyway. That leave you with the much simpler task of securing communication of any details that needs to be kept safe, such as any knowledge of other sources, or details that might jeopardise their ability to publish, or the safety of other people. Hopefully that dataset is much smaller to the extent that someone acting as a courier can bring sufficient information "in his head" that remaining details can be rendered "harmless" by leaving out the information passed directly. It's interesting that Greenwald has admitted Miranda carried documents, as that makes very little sense - presumably they understood the potential of confiscation, and any documents would not be much more secure than if transferred directly. However Miranda might have carried with him knowledge of information otherwise left out, such as, say, pass phrases or a way to derive additional pass phrases that would allow any intercepted data to be protected better - any data on his devices ought to be inconsequential (at least that's what I'd hope, especially given Snowden mentioning that he started trusted Poitras when he realised she was more paranoid about him than he was about her). One such method would be for Miranda and/or other associates to take more than one trip. If intercepted you need to try again. If not, one or more of the files transferred might be a set of one time pads and all you need to do to massive increase security is to use said one time pads.
• AJ007 13y ago
  A good measure of how free a country is: are its own journalists safe putting their feet there.
• foobarqux 13y ago
  In the comments Rudsbridger, in all sincerity, is asking why a newspaper should have fought a government request to destroy source material. I mean this is the strongest position the Guardian could have challenged the government from: No risk to the story, public visibility, government has nothing to directly gain from having the material destroyed. What is being fought over is purely principle and a demonstration of obedience: Gov asks and Guardian rolls over. I presume we can expect the Guardian to routinely delete source material upon gov request if it hasn't been doing so already?
  • lostlogin 13y ago
    Or is it just complying because of the stupidity of the request? Because nothing was actually lost and nothing was deleted as such. A copy got wrecked, so what?
    • vidarh 13y ago
      I think I would have complied just because I'd want to see just how far down the rabbit hole they'd go. It'd be like getting front row seats to Terry Gilliams Brazil - The Musical (I'd set my normal hate of musicals aside if that ever became reality).
    • foobarqux 13y ago
      Both parties knew there were copies elsewhere. The act was a demonstration of compliance which has reinforced a relationship of subservience to the government.
  • ttctciyf 13y ago
    Not wanting to sound too cynical, but choosing to let them break out the sledgehammers does seem to have made a pretty good story in itself, doesn't it?
• suprgeek 13y ago
  The British Public are the (ideological) descendents of people who had the "Magna Carta Libertatum" as a cornerstone of their civil society. Now from everything that comes out it looks like Britain is closest to becoming the Orwellian nightmare - constant surveillance of citizenry, arbitrary detentions, suppression of the press and an uncaring bureaucracy. British folk ..."Remember remember the fifth of November". Speak out against this at every forum possible and kick out these enemies of freedom ASAP.
  • RA_Fisher 13y ago
    And install a theocracy?
  • gregsq 13y ago
    The developmental history of what might be called loosely the British Establishment is indeed interesting. If you're interested in a previous example of the relationship between MI5, the Home Office and the 'Press', you could look at the publication of the biography 'Spycatcher', by ex MI5 officer Peter Wright. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spycatcher http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spycatcher
  • einhverfr 13y ago
    Also remember the 16th of October, Though failed the gunpowder plot, The lowly, humble, and hardly remembered Tax receipts burned down their lot! (Referring to the Burning of Parliament when efforts to incinerate wooden tax receipts burned down both houses of parliament.)
• marcamillion 13y ago
  Wow....I can't quite understand the actions of governments these days. Did they really think that they could literally destroy the hard drives of the journalists working on these NSA scandals and that story wouldn't become a major story? As in....really now. Any amount of legitimacy that the Snowden leaks didn't have before, just got significantly bolstered with this type of action. How is this government still in power?
  • marcuspovey 13y ago
    Because when they failed to be not elected (the vast majority of those who voted voted for some other guy, but somehow these guys got to be in charge - first past the post, joy), they thought "stability" was the most important thing, and passed a law that said that there wouldn't be another election for at least 5 years.
• jmadsen 13y ago
  I'm sure the main point of grabbing Miranda (ironic name) was to get at whatever files he was carrying, but... Any thoughts that someone might use this as a way to "expose" Greenwald as being gay? Sorry, but there are a tremendous number of people for whom that will change their mind about the whole thing
• epo 13y ago
  Many of these comments are touchingly naive. Governments have always maintained absolute control over what they will permit to be said within thir own borders about matters affecting state security, whether this is about home or abroad. Nothing has changed, just because you have a web browser hasn't given you any more 'freedom'. In the UK we still have D-notices (now DA-notices) and the media still has to abide by their guidelines or discover the consequences. It is sad though that the "land of the free" needs an English newspaper to tell them what is going on. Your state control of the media must be even stronger than ours.
  • vidarh 13y ago
    Compliance with D-notices are voluntary. They are notices that indicate concern and puts the press on notice that some of what they report may lead to lawsuits if they go ahead. They're intimidation of sorts, but they don't in themselves stop publication or make publication illegal. You'll notice that a lot of US media has to a decent extent chosen to ignore the latest DA-Notice relating to PRISM.
• jacquesm 13y ago
  "Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?" So there is the answer for how the UK/US division was picked for the NSA stories. This is an absolutely incredible article. Incredible because I both am shocked (yes, that's the right word this time) about the contents and incredible because I'd rather not have to believe it. Apparently the government of the UK now equates journalism with terrorism and will use laws instigated to squash terrorism to squash the free press or at a minimum attempt to intimidate it and to disrupt communications between members of the press. On top of all that they have spooks that seem incapable of understanding the first thing about digital communications visit a newspaper to oversee the physical destruction of a computer holding data of an investigation in progress. Incredible... what's next? I just read about the harassment Laura Poitras has to go through each time she travels. And all that for just doing your job? It is becoming really hard to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys.
  • eliasmacpherson 13y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLJUocaDYw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLJUocaDYw0 It's getting easier to distinguish.
    • jacquesm 13y ago
      "they didn't get to design our uniforms"
• nicholassmith 13y ago
  The Guardian shifted from a .co.uk to a .com very recently (~10-14 days ago), now showing content with a /uk subdomain. I wonder how much of that decision was based around the pressure they've been put under by the UK government. I imagine it's been a considered change for a while, but if you're starting to get concerned about journalistic freedom in the UK moving your reporting outside of it gives you a little wiggle room. Not sure how well it'll play long term, so we'll see. It's sickening seeing how far the UK government is going to persecute journalists for exposing the surveillance state that's been created over the last decade. Pulling journalists partners in for questioning as a terrorist, forcing destruction of uncomfortable evidence? All in the name of protecting us from another round of terrorism, when really there's been significantly fewer terrorist incidents in the last 10 years than in the 10 before. Edit: a quick traceroute shows that The Guardian seems to have it's servers for the .com outside the UK, and guardian.co.uk is/was located in London.
• JonFish85 13y ago
  I don't see what everyone is so shocked by. Sensitive government information is in the wild. The government is using laws in place to try to limit the exposure of said sensitive data. Personally I don't think that journalists are the ones who should have final say over what information should and should not be exposed. Regardless of which side of the argument you fall on, I don't see what is so revolting about this whole development. Journalist is thought to have very sensitive information about leading world powers. Leading world powers want information on who has the data, where it's been released, and want to limit further exposure. You want to be a journalist involved in releasing government top secret information? This is what you have to be ready to deal with. As a journalist, you're not above the law either. To be clear, I'm not saying the government is always right either, I'm saying that the government is just doing what it's job is: keep top secret information from reaching sensitive hands.
  • sophacles 13y ago
    And therein lies the real problem. Very few (possibly none) people think "I will subvert and subjugate the entire populace in evil oppressive ways for my own power". Rather they think "I truly believe my job is important and this is what's best". The SWAT teams that destroy a peaceful organic farm in Texas are just doing their job to collect evidence according to a warrant. There may be a little petty "fucking hippies attitude" in there, but they aren't thinking "lets scare everyone from ever trying to have a nice big garden again". The police commander/cheif/whatever isn't thinking "lets make sure to cause as much damage as possible", they are thinking "lets do this safely and decisively, criminals need to be shown there is no point in crime". The prosecutor and judge aren't thinking "hey oppressing is fun!" they are thinking "we need to live under the rule of law, lets make sure that happens", and that is just their job. Hell even the people who vote for laws and representatives are thinking "this really is the best way to keep crime down and keep people from trashing the nice places we're trying to make here. The intelligence apparatus is the same. Sure they are just doing their job to get material labeled as sensitive back under control. They really think it's dangerous for it to be out there. The people who label it such are truly under the impression that it is dangerous to the country they protect for it to be widely known. The people who build the gathering apparatus truly believe it won't be abused. The abusers themselves aren't looking at it and saying "oh subjugate subjugate subjugate!" They are saying "I know my motives are pure - a little abuse of means is less important than the noble end.". The bad ones are not saying "fuck the people, they are an impediment". They are saying "I can get my own position bettered by ignoring one little rule". They say " My primary goal is personal gain, this twisty interpretation gives me that, and besides - it's legal in that light, so why is it bad?" It's a death by a thousand cuts - the slow erosion of OK action by a large number of distributed players playing for their own gain. The agency of a group (a conspiracy) is not needed - and in fact would be better - it's easier to target and stop. The people who aren't abusers can't imagine the little abuses that would arise - they say "but it won't be used that way, it's absurd!" Think of it like engineering a system: the security people fight their own engineering teams as much as they fight the "bad guys". They hear regularly "why would anyone think to do that?" "how could someone know that to abuse it?" "I can't imagine anyone going to such trouble for my little bit" and on and on. It's difficult to make people who aren't used to thinking and seeing it realize that such things happen all the time. Human systems and rules aren't any different. This is what we need to focus on - closing the holes, fighting the little abuses, and generally making things overall better, rather than looking for the big conspiracies that may not even exist (because they don't actually need to).